Pásztor Emília (szerk.): A fény régészete. A természetes fény szerepe az őskori ember életében - Bajai dolgozatok 20. (Baja, 2017)
Andrzej Rozwadowski: Utazás a Naphoz. Égi szimbólumok a sámánizmusban és a szibériai, valamint a közép-ázsiai sziklarajzokon
ancient times. Only in July and August the stones in Saimaly-Tash are free from snow and only then can one see the petrogiyphs. Similarly to Tamgaly in Kazakhstan, also here we find engravings of human figures whose heads are replaced by sun-like symbols (figs 16 - 20). The range of associations between man and 'sun' in Saimaly-Tash is wider - there are images of humans who seem to hold the 'sun' in their hands (figs 19 and 20). A surprisingly fascinating context, which can shed light on the mystery of these petrogiyphs can be found in ancient Indian sacred texts of the Rig Veda, composed more or less in the second half of the second millennium BC. It appears that Vedic poets often referred to the sun. The sun, however, was not an object of straightforward worship but was rather a metaphor through which the poets expressed more complex beliefs and individual experiences. Particularly interesting are the fragments of the Rig Veda where the sun appears to be a metaphor for ecstatic experience, which was a privilege of priests who achieved the ritual ecstasy drinking sacred hallucinating drink soma. Drinking soma brought temporal immortality, which made a person equal to gods. Even more intriguing, some hymns state that a man drunk with soma was like the solar deity (Jurewicz 2001: 203). Shortly speaking, the state of soma intoxication was likened to the sun (Jurewicz 2010: 143-82). If the petrogiyphs in Saimaly-Tash therefore were created within the context of the Indo-lranian culture, which is truly possible (Rozwadowski 2001a, 2003), the sun-headed figures could be graphic metaphors of ritual ecstasy. In this case the image of the sun could be consciously chosen to express mental feelings of reaching the highest state of knowledge (maybe even without any reference to entoptic visions). Recalling that some of these rock art figures are holding the sun in their hands, it is surprising to read opinions of researchers of Vedic texts who write that some verses in the Rig Veda make impression of 'a close proximity to the sun, as if the author [intoxicated] had it right before his eyes' (Jurewicz 2001: 304). Equally significant is that some human figures in Saimaly-Tash stretch their hands upwards to the Sky (fig. 17). Furthermore, taking into account the placement of the site high in the mountains it is hard not to think that people reaching this place were approaching a liminal point, as only the sky was higher. Detailed symbolism of individual petrogiyphs is surely difficult to define. It seems, however, that the sun and sky with stars indeed constituted important components of ancient beliefs and cults of prehistoric peoples in Siberia and Central Asia, and rock art supports this view. In recent times, astral symbols became part of a more complex 177
